Peter Bottomley: I do not think anyone enjoys taking part in this debate. Were the Government’s motion to be considered unamended, I would vote for it. Had the second amendment been selected, I would vote for it. I will not vote for the first amendment.
I was on the Standards Committee up to 2003, when I withdrew on a point of practice, rather than principle, that the House, the Speaker and the then Labour Government had not supported Elizabeth Filkin. I am not going to change my practice now. I am one of the people, probably like most people in this House, who has read the full report. I have read what the chief vet said about the milk allegation. I have read what my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) has said, and to whom I join in party sympathy for what has happened in his life. I recognise that the involvement of Randox with Aintree and with him, and his wife’s role at Aintree, meant that he would be close to a business, and I recognise that much of what he said is uncontested by the commissioner and by the Standards Committee.
The issue is whether he would have done better, as I think was possibly indicated by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in Prime Minister’s questions, to have said that he held one view, the commissioner and the Committee held another, that he now recognises that what they felt was reasonable, and he is sorry to have a had a view that has caused this upset and these difficulties to all of us. I still hope that were I in that situation I would have had the sense, basically, to accept that there are views other than my own and that I should not always see things with my own justification rather than in the way people outside this House, and some inside this House, would see them.
On the decision as to whether the contents of the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) are correct, I do recognise that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, the 2003 recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life is worth looking at. But that was 18 years ago, and this is a serious problem. It should have been brought back for consideration by the House or by senior Members of this House during the past 18 years. I am happy to bring it forward now as a way of changing what should be the normal process of upholding the Standards Committee’s endorsement of the standards commissioner’s advice to the Committee.
I refer to the debate in 2010 when Jack Straw was the Justice Secretary and Sir George Young, as he then was, contributed for my party, as did I. We chose the system we are now using. If we want to consider changing it, we should do it in a proper way. I do not regard this as appropriate now.

Matthew Pennycook: My apologies, Mr Deputy Speaker; I thought that another contributor was waiting to speak before me.
It is a pleasure to wind up the Second Reading debate for the Opposition. Notwithstanding the somewhat overly partisan opening from the Minister of State, who came along, as he often does, with a set of pre-scripted remarks that were in danger of being as old as some of the nuclear plants that are presently being decommissioned, it has been a considered and well-informed debate in the main. I thank each right hon. or hon. Member who has taken part.
I will pick up on three points that have featured prominently. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) argued convincingly, although the Bill has the appearance of a general piece of enabling legislation, it is in practice concerned solely with the future of Sizewell C; I believe that the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) has just conceded that. Sizewell C is a project that EDF has no intention of financing from its own balance sheet and that we know has failed to entice the necessary private investors, as the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) mentioned in relation to Moorside and the fact that the current funding model is not fit for purpose.
It is vital that we bear that point in mind as the Bill progresses, because unfortunately for some, and much as the spin might suggest otherwise, it does not herald the dawn of a new nuclear fleet. It is simply a necessary means of resolving the issue of whether Sizewell, the last potential nuclear project that could conceivably begin to generate by the end of this decade, is constructed or not, and—this was referred to by the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) and, in an intervention, by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham)—the issue of whether the cost reductions that will flow from the plant’s being a clone of Hinkley Point C, and its ability to draw on the skills and workforce associated with that site, are secured.
Several Members, including the hon. Members for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) and for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), argued that nuclear should not form any part of the UK’s future low-carbon energy mix. We on this side of the House respect their strongly held views on the subject, but we take the view, as does the Committee on Climate Change, that a limited amount of new nuclear is required to achieve the decarbonisation of the UK’s electricity system within the next 14 years, and to meet our longer-term net zero target. Since Sizewell C is the only power station that can now feasibly come online within that timeframe, we want to ensure that it does, in order to provide the necessary amount of firm power to support a predominantly renewable energy mix.

Matthew Pennycook: I think we will need a range of technologies. Let me return to a point that has been made by several Members. I think we must take a lead from the Committee on Climate Change, which made its view very clear in its balanced pathway scenario for the sixth carbon budget. It estimates that we will  need 10 GW of nuclear power by 2035. We will have a predominantly renewable energy system, but we do need the firm power that comes from a limited degree of nuclear to support that.
My second point relates to what has been the elephant in the room today, namely China’s involvement in UK nuclear power. As we debate the principle of the Bill today and scrutinise its provisions in the weeks to come, that issue cannot be set aside. Members in all parts of the House want to understand more fully precisely where the Government now stand on the deeply flawed deal that they struck with China General Nuclear in relation to Sizewell, which has been mentioned several times in the debate.
The CGN stake in Sizewell was without doubt a sweetener for the far larger prize of unfettered Chinese ownership and operation of a nuclear plant at Bradwell, but while it seems certain that the very notion of a Chinese-run UK nuclear plant is now dead, we have yet to hear Ministers say so explicitly, or tell the House how the Government intend to disentangle themselves from the 2016 investment agreement signed by the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). We deserve to be told, and I hope that the Minister will at least make some reference to that issue in his closing remarks. We also need to know how the Government plan to divest CGN of its minority stake in Sizewell C, and what the estimated impact of that divestment will be on the overall financing of the project, because that issue has very real implications for the mechanism that the Government have chosen to enable Sizewell to progress, namely the RAB model.
That brings me to my third and final point. A number of Members, including the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) and the right hon. Member for Kingswood spoke clearly and forcefully about the advantages of the RAB model. It is not in dispute that the proposed model will lower the cost of capital on nuclear projects—I fully accept that—and it is also not in dispute that it would lower overall costs, although Conservative Members take issue with the frankly heroic assumptions that underpin the claimed £30 billion to £80 billion in long-term savings vis-à-vis coal-fired financed projects. However, it is also undeniably the case that these advantages would be secured as a result of shifting a proportion of risk on to consumers.
It is worth emphasising not only that the RAB for which the Bill would provide, and the risk therefore entailed in it, are of a different order of magnitude from RAB arrangements utilised on other infrastructure projects, but also that when it comes to the yearly surcharges levied on customers on those projects financed via RAB arrangements—for example, the Thames tideway tunnel, which has been mentioned
several times today—there is an inherent degree of uncertainty about the level at which those charges might peak. That is why it is important that the right hon. Members for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) and for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) and the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) rightly emphasised the need to scrutinise the precise arrangements that will be brought forward and the need for safeguards when doing so.
While we on this side of the House acknowledge the advantages of the RAB model for new nuclear compared with contracts for difference financing, we have concerns about the potential exposure of customers if costs rise significantly or if serious overruns take place. We do not oppose the principle of the Bill, and we have no intention of voting against it this evening, but we intend to look very carefully in Committee at precisely how the Government intend to implement the RAB model in question, at whether its benefits are as significant as has been claimed, and at how many investors the Government expect to return to the UK market if this legislation passes. Most importantly, we want to work with the Government to explore ways in which consumers might be better protected from escalating costs in the event that things go wrong. New nuclear must provide secure and affordable low-carbon energy, but it is still by no means clear that the Bill stands to deliver in both those respects. It is imperative that it should do so.